How the US has hidden its empire

The United States likes to think of itself as a republic, but it holds territories all over the world – the map you always see doesn’t tell the whole story. By Daniel Immerwahr

Fri 15 Feb 2019 01.00 EST Last modified on Fri 15 Feb 2019 08.28 EST

There aren’t many historical episodes more firmly lodged in the United States’s national memory than the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is one of only a few events that many people in the country can put a date to: 7 December 1941, the “date which will live in infamy,” as Franklin D Roosevelt put it. Hundreds of books have been written about it – the Library of Congress holds more than 350. And Hollywood has made movies, from the critically acclaimed From Here to Eternity, starring Burt Lancaster, to the critically derided Pearl Harbor, starring Ben Affleck.

But what those films don’t show is what happened next. Nine hours after Japan attacked the territory of Hawaii, another set of Japanese planes came into view over another US territory, the Philippines. As at Pearl Harbor, they dropped their bombs, hitting several air bases, to devastating effect.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that – an attack. Japan’s bombers struck, retreated and never returned. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos – US nationals who saluted the stars and stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief – fell under a foreign power.

Contrary to popular memory, the event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on US and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.

At first, “Pearl Harbor” was not the way most people referred to the bombings. “Japs bomb Manila, Hawaii” was the headline in one New Mexico paper; “Japanese Planes Bomb Honolulu, Island of Guam” in another in South Carolina. Sumner Welles, FDR’s undersecretary of state, described the event as “an attack upon Hawaii and upon the Philippines”. Eleanor Roosevelt used a similar formulation in her radio address on the night of 7 December, when she spoke of Japan “bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines”.

That was how the first draft of FDR’s speech went, too: it presented the event as a “bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines”. Yet Roosevelt toyed with that draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. At some point he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines.

Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don’t know, but it’s not hard to guess. Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the US. But he faced a problem. Were Japan’s targets considered “the United States”? Legally, they were indisputably US territory. But would the public see them that way? What if Roosevelt’s audience didn’t care that Japan had attacked the Philippines or Guam? Polls taken slightly before the attack show that few in the continental US supported a military defense of those remote territories.

Roosevelt no doubt noted that the Philippines and Guam, although technically part of the US, seemed foreign to many. Hawaii, by contrast, was more plausibly “American”. Although it was a territory rather than a state, it was closer to North America and significantly whiter than the others.

Yet even when it came to Hawaii, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. So, on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu”, but the “American island of Oahu”. Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces”, and “very many American lives” had been lost.

An American island, where American lives were lost – that was the point he was trying to make. If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawaii was being rounded up to “American”.

One reporter in the Philippines described the scene in Manila as the crowds listened to Roosevelt’s speech on the radio. The president spoke of Hawaii and the many lives lost there. Yet he only mentioned the Philippines, the reporter noted, “very much in passing”. Roosevelt made the war “seem to be something close to Washington and far from Manila”.

This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail. “To Manilans the war was here, now, happening to us,” the reporter wrote. “And we have no air-raid shelters.”

Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam – it wasn’t easy to know how to think about such places, or even what to call them. At the turn of the 20th century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii, Wake), their status was clear. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies.

That spirit of forthright imperialism didn’t last. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. “The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples,” an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.

Yet a striking feature of the overseas territories was how rarely they were even discussed. The maps of the country that most people had in their heads didn’t include places such as the Philippines. Those mental maps imagined the US to be contiguous: a union of states bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico and Canada.

That is how most people envision the US today, possibly with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii. The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the “logo map”, meaning that if the country had a logo, this shape would be it:

The US ‘logo map’

The problem with the logo map, however, is that it isn’t right. Its shape does not match the country’s legal borders. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in 1959 and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since 1899. When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas or any of the other smaller islands that the US has annexed over the years?

In 1941, the year Japan attacked, a more accurate picture would have been this:

A map of the ‘Greater United States’ as it was in 1941

What this map shows is the country’s full territorial extent: the “Greater United States”, as some at the turn of the 20th century called it. In this view, the place normally referred to as the US – the logo map – forms only a part of the country. A large and privileged part, to be sure, yet still only a part. Residents of the territories often call it the “mainland”.

On this to-scale map, Alaska isn’t shrunken down to fit into a small inset, as it is on most maps. It is the right size – ie, huge. The Philippines, too, looms large, and the Hawaiian island chain – the whole chain, not just the eight main islands shown on most maps – if superimposed on the mainland would stretch almost from Florida to California.

This map also shows territory at the other end of the size scale. In the century before 1940, the US claimed nearly 100 uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Some claims were forgotten in time – Washington could be surprisingly lax about keeping tabs. The 22 islands included here are the ones that appeared in official tallies (the census or other governmental reports) in the 1940s. I have represented them as clusters of dots in the bottom left and right corners, although they are so small that they would be invisible if they were drawn to scale.

The logo map is not only misleading because it excludes large colonies and pinprick islands alike. It also suggests that the US is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another. But that is not true, and it has never been true. From its founding until the present day, the US has contained a union of American states, as its name suggests. But it has also contained another part: not a union, not states and (for most of its history) not wholly in the Americas – its territories.

What is more, a lot of people have lived in that other part. According to the census count for the inhabited territories in 1940, the year before Pearl Harbor, nearly 19 million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. That meant slightly more than one in eight of the people in the US lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in 12 was African American. If you lived in the US on the eve of the second world war, in other words, you were more likely to be colonised than black.

My point here is not to weigh forms of oppression against one another. In fact, the histories of African Americans and colonised peoples are tightly connected (and sometimes overlapping, as for the African-Caribbeans in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery also engulfed the territories. Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called racial epithets, subjected to dangerous medical experiments and used as sacrificial pawns in war. They, too, had to make their way in a country where some lives mattered and others did not.

What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to US history than is usually supposed. It hasn’t just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, but also the country itself – where the borders went, who has counted as “American”. Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the US.

Looking beyond the logo map, however, could be hard for mainlanders. The national maps they used rarely showed the territories. Even the world atlases were confusing. During the second world war, Rand McNally’s Ready Reference Atlas of the World – like many other atlases at the time – listed Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as “foreign”.

A class of seventh-grade girls at the Western Michigan College Training School in Kalamazoo scratched their heads over this. They had been trying to follow the war on their maps. How, they wondered, could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been an attack on the US if Hawaii was foreign? They wrote to Rand McNally to inquire.

“Although Hawaii belongs to the United States, it is not an integral part of this country,” the publisher replied. “It is foreign to our continental shores, and therefore cannot logically be shown in the United States proper.”

The girls were not satisfied. Hawaii is not an integral part of this country? “We believe this statement is not true,” they wrote. It is “an alibi instead of an explanation”. Further, they continued, “we feel that the Rand McNally atlas is misleading and a good cause for the people of outlying possessions to be embarrassed and disturbed”. The girls forwarded the correspondence to the Department of the Interior and asked for adjudication. Of course, the seventh-graders were right. As an official clarified, Hawaii was, indeed, part of the US.

Yet the government could be just as misleading as Rand McNally on this score. Consider the census: according to the constitution, census takers were required to count only the states, but they had always counted the territories, too. Or, at least, they had counted the continental territories. The overseas territories were handled differently. Their populations were noted, but they were otherwise excluded from demographic calculations. Basic facts about how long people lived, how many children they had, what races they were – these were given for the mainland alone.

The maps and census reports that mainlanders saw presented them with a selectively cropped portrait of their country. The result was profound confusion. “Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions,” concluded a governmental report written during the second world war. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only ‘foreigners’, such as the British, have an ‘empire’. Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an ‘empire’.”

The proposition that the US is an empire is less controversial today. The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist. Then, in the 1840s, the US fought a war with Mexico and seized a third of it. Fifty years later, it fought a war with Spain and claimed the bulk of Spain’s overseas territories.

Empire isn’t just landgrabs, though. What do you call the subordination of African Americans? Starting in the interwar period, the celebrated US intellectual WEB Du Bois argued that black people in the US looked more like colonised subjects than like citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, have agreed.

Or what about the spread of US economic power abroad? The US might not have physically conquered western Europe after the second world war, but that didn’t stop the French from complaining of “coca-colonisation”. Critics there felt swamped by US commerce. Today, with the world’s business denominated in dollars, and McDonald’s in more than 100 countries, you can see they might have had a point.

Flags on top of the fortress in Old San Juan in Puerto Rico. Photograph: Anton Gorbov/Alamy

Then there are the military interventions. The years since the second world war have brought the US military to country after country. The big wars are well-known: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. But there has also been a constant stream of smaller engagements. Since 1945, US armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.

Yet among all the talk of empire, one thing that often slips from view is actual territory. Yes, many would agree that the US is or has been an empire, for all the reasons above. But how much can most people say about the colonies themselves? Not, I would wager, very much.

It is not as if the information isn’t out there. Scholars, many working from the sites of empire themselves, have assiduously researched this topic for decades. The problem is that their works have been sidelined – filed, so to speak, on the wrong shelves. They are there, but as long as we have the logo map in our heads, they will seem irrelevant. They will seem like books about foreign countries. The confusion and shoulder-shrugging indifference that mainlanders displayed at the time of Pearl Harbor hasn’t changed much at all.

I will confess to having made this conceptual filing error myself. Although I studied US foreign relations as a doctoral student and read countless books about “American empire” – the wars, the coups, the meddling in foreign affairs – nobody ever expected me to know even the most elementary facts about the territories. They just didn’t feel important.

It wasn’t until I travelled to Manila, researching something else entirely, that it clicked. To get to the archives, I would travel by “jeepney”, a transit system originally based on repurposed US army jeeps. I boarded in a section of Metro Manila where the streets are named after US colleges (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren, Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I would arrive at my destination, the Ateneo de Manila University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, I would hear students speaking what sounded to my Pennsylvanian ears to be virtually unaccented English. Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it is impossible to miss.

The Philippines is not a US territory any more; it got its independence after the second world war. Other territories, although they were not granted independence, received new statuses. Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth”, which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one. Hawaii and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union.

Yet today, the US continues to hold overseas territory. Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world.

None of this, however – not the large colonies, small islands, or military bases – has made much of a dent on the mainland mind. One of the truly distinctive features of the US’s empire is how persistently ignored it has been. This is, it is worth emphasising, unique. The British weren’t confused as to whether there was a British empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn’t forget that Algeria was French. It is only the US that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders.

The reason is not hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese empire to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars, a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.

This self-image of the US as a republic is consoling, but it is also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies and around the military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the US empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.

The logo map carries a cost for mainlanders, too. It gives them a truncated view of their own history, one that excludes part of their country. It is an important part. The overseas parts of the US have triggered wars, brought forth inventions, raised up presidents and helped define what it means to be “American”. Only by including them in the picture do we see a full portrait of the country – not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.

How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr will be published by Bodley Head on 28 February. Buy it at guardianbookshop.com

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Americans have healthier hearts. We have a healthier budget, too.

Thanks to preventive medicine, older Americans have healthier hearts. Which also means, incidentally, that federal budgets are healthier, too.

At the turn of the millennium, health spending growth was spiraling out of control. Economists projected that the already ginormous health-care sector would soon gobble up monster portions of the federal budget and the entire economy. But something strange happened over the past decade and a half.

That’s true whether we’re talking about public- or private-sector health spending; for Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance and out-of-pocket spending, annual outlays have been way lower than the doomsday forecasters anticipated. Curiously, too, the sharpest slowdown has occurred with Medicare.

In fact, about three-quarters of the health spending slowdown nationwide was due to slow-as-an-(almost)-trickle growth in spending on the elderly. From 1992 to 2004, per-capita spending among Medicare beneficiaries grew by 3.8 percent each year, adjusted for economy-wide inflation; since 2005, the rate has been a mere 1.1 percent, according to a new Health Affairs study.

In plain English, that means total spending per elderly person hasn’t fallen, per se, but we’re spending thousands of dollars less today than was projected to be the case back in the early 2000s.

(Catherine Rampell/The Washington Post)

So who gets credit?

Some have attributed the spending slowdown to lousy economic conditions, although in retrospect the timing isn’t exactly right. The deceleration appears to have begun before the Great Recession, and it continued long after it ended. What’s more, Medicare spending should be relatively shielded from the business cycle, at least relative to the private sector.

Some have credited structural changes to the health-care system, including some of Obamacare’s cost-control measures. Maybe bundled payments and accountable care organizations are responsible — though studies so far suggest their effects have been modest compared with the magnitude of the overall changes in health spending trends. What’s more, the slowdown pre-dates Obamacare.

That new study suggests a different cause: Americans taking better care of their hearts.

The study, from a team of researchers led by Harvard economics professor David M. Cutler, focuses specifically on medical spending for the elderly. The authors began by disaggregating spending into categories, based on the condition a patient was being treated for — cancer, dementia and so on.

They noticed something striking. The categories with far and away the biggest slowdown in spending were related to heart health. Spending on cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases (heart attack, cardiac arrest, stroke, etc.) declined by $827 per person, relative to earlier trends. Spending on a related category called cardiovascular risk factors (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes) also fell $802 per person below the trend line.

(Catherine Rampell/The Washington Post)

Altogether, the researchers calculated that more than half of the elderly spending slowdown was because of slower spending on cardiovascular diseases and conditions. In dollar terms, this means the slowdown in cardiovascular spending growth effectively saved the Medicare program about $34 billion in 2012 (the most recent year of data available).

You can see similar results in other health stats. Elderly death rates for cardiovascular diseases, for instance, have plummeted, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(Catherine Rampell/The Washington Post)

These are significant findings, with major policy implications.

The conventional wisdom among health policy experts has long been that preventive medicine does not save money. It has other virtues — including, well, making people healthier. That’s quite a good thing! But study after study has found that in dollar terms, at least, investing more in preventive care doesn’t pay off.

This new paper suggests that at least when it comes to heart health, that’s not the case.

Lower-than-expected cardiovascular spending appears to be primarily due to successful use of preventive measures, the authors find. Greater use of statins, anti-hypertensives, diabetes medications and aspirin has helped prevent lots of expensive health events and contributed to outright declines in hospital admissions for heart disease and stroke.

“We think that half of the reduction in cardiovascular cost growth is a result of more people taking medications and taking them more regularly,” Cutler said.

Why are people taking their meds more regularly? The authors don’t know for sure, but there are a few possibilities. There’s more awareness of the need for treatment, for one. But also, a bunch of existing drugs went off patent and got cheaper. And in 2006, we got Medicare Part D, which reduced out-of-pocket prescription costs for many older people and probably led to more compliance.

Whether policymakers can duplicate these results for other health conditions and preventive therapies remains to be seen. But as the country debates the fiscal and moral merits of expanding health coverage, these latest findings are useful — and heartening? — data points.

When you make your list of heroes, save a spot for Ernest Fitzgerald: smart, fearless, witty. Makes James Comey (whom I like) look like sort of a doofus. He also gets bonus points for continuing to work to the end of his career, in spite of the leaders’ attempts to ostracize him.

A. Ernest Fitzgerald, a Pentagon official tasked with analyzing project expenses, was summoned to Capitol Hill in 1968 to discuss a new fleet of Lockheed C-5A transport planes before the Joint Economic Committee.

He had been instructed to play dumb about the cost.

He did not.

Under oath, he said the C-5A was $2 billion over budget. In testifying, Mr. Fitzgerald later said, he was merely “committing truth.”

The revelation about the vast cost overruns made national headlines, stunning members of Congress as well as Mr. Fitzgerald’s superiors. Back at the Pentagon, he was met with a blunt question from his secretary: “Have you been fired yet?”

Mr. Fitzgerald lasted another two years in his position before President Richard M. Nixon ordered his dismissal. He went on to sue Nixon, an action that resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case on presidential immunity and helped make him “America’s best-known whistleblower,” The Washington Post wrote in 1987.

Through his more than 50 subsequent appearances on Capitol Hill, said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Mr. Fitzgerald all but single-handedly “created the concept of Pentagon waste and fraud. People didn’t even think about it. And now they very much understand it is happening,” even as policymakers have failed “to listen to his message,” she said.

Mr. Fitzgerald, alternately dubbed “the patron saint of government whistleblowers” and “the most hated man in the Air Force,” was 92 when he died Jan. 31, exactly 46 years after Nixon’s Oval Office taping system recorded the president discussing Mr. Fitzgerald’s ouster.

“This guy that was fired,” he told aide Charles W. Colson, “I’d marked it in the news summary. That’s how that happened. I said get rid of that son of a bitch.”

“The point was not that he was complaining about the overruns,” Nixon said in a separate conversation that day, “but that he was doing it in public. . . . And not, and frankly, not taking orders.”

The transcripts were made public as part of Mr. Fitzgerald’s effort to win $3.5 million in damages from Nixon and three of his aides — the final chapter in a legal saga that began soon after his C-5A testimony, when the Air Force inundated him with busy work, investigated his private life and launched a smear campaign against him, according to court documents.

In 1970, he was laid off from his position as a senior financial management specialist; he was told that it was part of a general staff reduction. Mr. Fitzgerald fought the dismissal with a lawsuit, and in 1973 the Civil Service Commission took his side, ordering his reinstatement with around $80,000 in back pay.

But while his job title was the same, the work was not.

“I’m completely excluded from the big weapons systems jobs,” Mr. Fitzgerald told The Post. “They keep me out of Boeing’s and Lockheed’s hair and all the big ones.” He was instead ordered to examine maintenance depots. As his daughter Nancy Fitzgerald-Greene said in an interview, the Air Force “put him in charge of inspecting bowling alleys in Thailand.”

In 1974, Mr. Fitzgerald sued again, this time targeting Nixon, in an action that went to the Supreme Court. In 1982, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that the president was “entitled to absolute immunity,” with Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. explaining that “because of the singular importance of the president’s duties, diversion of his energies by concern with private lawsuits would raise unique risks to the effective functioning of government.”

By then, however, Mr. Fitzgerald had won a victory of sorts: One year earlier, Nixon had secretly paid him $144,000 to keep the case from going to trial. Previously, Newsweek reported, the former president had offered to contact President Jimmy Carter to see whether he might be able to arrange Mr. Fitzgerald’s appointment to director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The Pentagon, however, remained Mr. Fitzgerald’s home for decades. Poring over contracts and financial records, he testified dozens of times before Congress and forged close relationships with leaders of both parties. In a tribute to Mr. Fitzgerald given Wednesday on the Senate floor, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) called him “a tenacious watchdog . . . a hero for taxpayers and a warrior against waste.” Years earlier, Proxmire told People magazine that Mr. Fitzgerald was “one of the very few people in government who has made a difference.”

In the early 1980s, as part of his battle against Pentagon waste and inefficiency, Mr. Fitzgerald developed the idea for the Project on Military Procurement, which evolved into POGO. The organization was designed to build on the findings of Pentagon insiders such as Mr. Fitzgerald, who uncovered inflated costs as well as evidence of falsified weapons tests, in which defense contractors were “cutting corners to get things out into the field,” Brian said.

Mr. Fitzgerald, who retired in 2006, also devised a novel strategy for explaining the extent of wasteful spending in the military, which he once estimated at $30 billion each year.

“An average person cannot relate to the overpricing of an airplane like the F-15 fighter or B-1 bomber or an M-1 tank, so first, we have to explain how the Pentagon’s overpricing scam works in terms of things they are familiar with, like toilet seats, hammers, screws, ashtrays, etc.,” he said, according to a remembrance by fellow military analyst Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney. “Then, step 2 is simply to explain how an F-15 or B-1 bomber or M-1 is simply a bundle of overpriced spare parts flying in close formation.”

Among Mr. Fitzgerald’s findings: A plastic stool-leg cap that cost 34 cents, but was billed at $916.55; labor for a Boeing cruise missile, estimated at $14 an hour but paid at $114; and a six-inch airplane maintenance tool that, inexplicably, cost $11,492.

Separately, railing against unnecessary spending on large-scale defense projects, he cited a maxim he dubbed Fitzgerald’s First Law: “There are only two phases of a program. The first is, ‘It’s too early to tell.’ The second: ‘It’s too late to stop.’ ”

The older of two children, Arthur Ernest Fitzgerald was born in Birmingham, Ala., on July 31, 1926. His father was a patternmaker, and his mother ran a small farm.

Mr. Fitzgerald served in the Navy during World War II and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama in 1951. He worked in the aerospace industry and formed a consulting firm before joining the Air Force as a civilian in 1965.

By then he had developed a specialty, cost-cutting, that helped him earn a nomination for the Defense Department’s Distinguished Civilian Service Award. But the praise stopped flowing after the C-5A hearings, and during the years he was out of work, he and his family “went to the rice and beans diet a lot,” Fitzgerald-Greene said.

Mr. Fitzgerald died at an assisted-living center in Falls Church, Va., she said. The cause was not immediately known. His wife of more than 50 years, the former Nell Burroughs, died in 2012. In addition to Fitzgerald-Greene, of Falls Church, survivors include two other children, Susan Fitzgerald of Vienna, Va., and John P. Fitzgerald of Marlow, Ala.; and four grandchildren.

The precise cause of death was not immediately known, his daughter said.

While Mr. Fitzgerald had some success in renegotiating Air Force contracts and eliminating inefficiencies, he said his efforts to spur broader changes were repeatedly blocked. He recalled Air Force Gen. John “Zeke” Zoeckler once telling him, “inefficiency is national policy.”

“Some of the Pentagon scams we once deplored are viewed as virtues,” Mr. Fitzgerald said in 1996, in a mournful acceptance speech for the Paul H. Douglas Ethics in Government Award. “The unit costs of defense are scandalously high, and going up. Porking-up contracts for political purposes, always present, but formerly stoutly denied, is now a good thing. It makes good jobs.”

[This story is particularly poignant for me, given the recent death of Kincey Potter, my wife and a strong and effective advocate for Bay restoration programs for the last 15 years. Kincey took up the conservation banner, after a long and effective career in Information Technology, because she was affronted and appalled “by the deterioration of the Chesapeake Bay in my lifetime.” But at the end she was also convinced that continued, committed implementation of the “new” Chesapeake Bay Program would lead to improvements in the Bay’s condition,]

Bay Journal

Maryland oyster population down by half since 1999, study finds

First-ever Bay stock assessment sees overfishing in more than half of Chesapeake

By Timothy B. Wheeler on November 21, 2018

Watermen overharvested oysters last winter in a little more than half of Maryland’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, according to the state’s first-ever stock assessment of the commercially and ecologically valuable shellfish. If those harvest rates continue, the assessment warned, the bivalve population in those areas could eventually be wiped out.

The assessment’s estimate of Maryland’s total oyster population in 2018 is less than 10 percent of what was harvested annually before 1900, a former federal fisheries scientist pointed out. (Dave Harp)

The 359-page assessment report, released Tuesday, estimated that Maryland’s overall population of adult oysters this year is half what it was 18 years ago.The assessment, prepared by the Department of Natural Resources in consultation with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, sets the stage for a potentially fractious debate in coming months over the state’s management of the keystone Bay species, which is also a pillar of Maryland’s seafood industry.

Watermen who were briefed on the assessment Monday night at the DNR’s Oyster Advisory Commission reacted skeptically to its findings. But Alison Prost, Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, issued a statement afterward saying it “confirmed some of our greatest fears about the Bay’s oyster population. The state needs to develop a fishery management plan that protects existing and restored oyster reefs to significantly increase the overall oyster population.”

Mandated in 2017 by the General Assembly, the stock assessment drew on DNR surveys and catch data from 1999 through the wild oyster harvest season that ended last spring. DNR and UMCES scientists used mathematical models to estimate oyster abundance, habitat availability, harvest rates and natural mortality from environmental conditions such as harsh weather and disease.

The study estimated that Maryland’s oyster population plummeted from about 600 million in 1999 to around 200 million by 2002, a period that saw the Bay’s bivalves ravaged by an outbreak of the oyster diseases MSX and Dermo. The harvest hit an all-time low of 19,000 bushels in 2004.

The diseases abated after that, and the study estimates that the state’s oyster stock rebounded to more than 450 million by 2014, with harvests also rising that year to more than 400,000 bushels. Since then, natural reproduction has been lackluster, and the assessment estimated that the population has declined again to an estimated 300 million this year. Last season’s harvest slipped to 180,000 bushels.

The study didn’t assess whether the state’s oyster population as a whole was overharvested, but rather weighed the bivalves’ status in each of 36 different zones spanning Maryland’s portion of the Bay and its tributaries.

“What’s happening with oysters in different parts of the Bay is different,” explained Mike Wilberg, an associate professor at UMCES’ Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, who worked with DNR scientists to conduct the stock assessment.

Oysters tend to be less abundant in the Upper Bay and its tributaries, such as the Chester River, where lower salinity in the water tends to impede reproduction. Reproduction and abundance are better in saltier water farther south in places like Tangier Sound and the Maryland tributaries of the Potomac River, but those also happen to be the areas more affected by diseases.

For each area of the Bay, the report identified a threshold harvest rate that, if regularly exceeded, it predicted would lead to eventual population declines. It also set a target for each area that if the percentage of oysters harvested regularly stayed at or below that level, the catch would be maximized over time while the population would remain stable or even increase.

In some areas, including all of the Western Shore tributaries and Eastern Bay, the assessment found that almost any level of harvest would deplete the stock because abundance was so low.

The assessment found that fishing pressure exceeded sustainable levels, given natural mortality and reproduction, in 19 of the 36 zones into which the state’s portion of the Bay had been divided. Overfishing occurred last season in most of the Tangier Sound area, in Eastern Bay, in the Patuxent River and in the Potomac River tributaries, it said.

In 14 areas, though — including most of the Choptank River and the Bay mainstem — fishing pressure last season was at or below the target for maximizing harvest and maintaining oyster abundance. And in three areas — two in southern Tangier Sound and one in the Honga River — the harvest rate was below the ceiling for sustainability but above the target for building or maintaining the population.

Wilberg stressed that the assessment only looked at the status of the oyster population, not at how it should be managed. When the final report is submitted to the General Assembly by Dec. 1, DNR officials said it would include a list of management options, without making any recommendations.The assessment found harvest rates exceeded sustainable levels in 19 of 36 areas of the Bay and its tributaries, but below those thresholds in the other areas. (Dave Harp)

The assessment found harvest rates exceeded sustainable levels in 19 of 36 areas of the Bay and its tributaries, but below those thresholds in the other areas. (Dave Harp)

That report is certain to revive debate about how the state’s oyster fishery ought to be managed.

Maryland expanded its oyster sanctuary network in 2010 to cover 25 percent of state waters — a move that drew the ire of watermen. They complained that the new harvest-free zones took three-fourths of their best oystering areas. And they have pressed to get back into at least some of those areas.

In early 2017, with wild harvests on the decline, the DNR proposed to open some of the state’s oyster sanctuaries. But lawmakers blocked that move by requiring the department to conduct a stock assessment first and figure out a sustainable harvest rate.

Watermen on the DNR advisory commission found fault with the assessment’s methods and conclusions Monday night.

Robert T. Brown, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, questioned the report’s finding that the highest harvest rate that could be sustained anywhere in the Bay was 43 percent in Fishing Bay, with even lower sustainable harvest thresholds elsewhere. He said the reason so many areas seemed to be overfished was because watermen had been forced to work remaining areas more intensively after being forced out of the sanctuaries.

Ron Fithian, a Kent County commissioner and former waterman, put much of the blame for declines in oyster abundance on the state’s abandonment in 2006 of an annual program of replenishing oyster reefs with shells. The subsequent expansion of sanctuaries has made it worse, he argued.

“There’s no evidence that these sanctuaries have helped areas around it,” he said. There’s no evidence that anything we’ve done for the last eight or nine years has helped in any way, shape or form.”

Large-scale oyster restoration efforts launched in sanctuaries in Harris Creek, the Little Choptank River and Tred Avon River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore do appear to be succeeding, according to a recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Monitoring in 2017 found hatchery-spawned oysters that had been planted on restored reefs were surviving and growing, and that there was evidence of natural reproduction, with new young oysters appearing since the plantings.

The stock assessment factored the state’s extensive network of oyster sanctuaries into its estimation of bivalve abundance in each area around the Bay. But it said there wasn’t any way at this time to tell whether there was any spillover of reproduction from the oysters in those harvest-free zones that would allow for higher sustainable harvest rates in neighboring public fishery areas.

The stock assessment was reviewed by a trio of independent scientists. Paul Rago, a retired federal fisheries scientist who chaired the review, said the panel found the DNR-UMCES team assessed the state’s oyster population in a “scientifically credible way.”

The Bay has changed greatly since the heyday of its oyster fishery in the late 1800s, Rago pointed out. Much of the oyster reef habitat has been lost, water quality has declined and diseases have caused significant die-offs. The estimated total population of 300 million oysters in Maryland waters in 2018 is less than 10 percent of what was harvested each year before 1900, he noted.

While the Bay’s oyster population can benefit from reduced diseases, better reproduction and continuing efforts to clean up pollution, Rago said, rebuilding the stock will also require enhancement of reef habitat and control of fishing mortality.

With the assessment’s findings as a guide, Rago added “the big challenges are yet to come.” It won’t be easy, he said, to follow the science while balancing the competing interests of watermen, oyster farmers and those seeking to increase the oyster population because of its ecological benefits to the Bay. Oysters help to filter the Bay’s water, and their reefs provide habitat for fish, crabs and other marine creatures.

DNR officials said the stock assessment would be used to update the state’s fishery management plan for oysters. Chris Judy, chief of the DNR’s shellfish division, said that process would begin soon, after review of the assessment by lawmakers and public feedback. He said it would be “many months down the road” before the revision would be complete.

About Timothy B. WheelerTimothy B. Wheeler is associate editor and senior writer for the Bay Journal. He has more than two decades of experience covering the environment for The Baltimore Sun and other media outlets. Send Tim an e-mail.

]]>Bruce Shrodinger: here kitty, kittyCape May – Thanksgiving 2018 – Thank You, Americahttps://pottersweal.com/2018/11/22/cape-may-thanksgiving-2018-thank-you-america/
Thu, 22 Nov 2018 18:59:49 +0000http://pottersweal.com/?p=174056970Continue reading →]]>So this year the Potter/Paganos’ holiday party happened to take place in Cape May, New Jersey last weekend. Here’s brother Peter Potter’s capture of the Inn at Cape May, followed by National Public Radio’s crowd-sourced “Thank You America,” assembled from listener submissions by poet Kwame Alexander, 11/22/2018, which also mentions Cape May.

Thank You, America

The sun rising behind farm houses in the MidwestThe clear mountain rivers in MontanaI hope we have the wisdom to treasure all of it.

A glimmer of dawnFirst flickers in Maine

For the mountains.magnificent weathered beacons of topographical wonder.

Tengo gracias that I can speak my mindy no aye consecuencia graves when I do so.

I won’t lie, I struggled with this questionWith all the fighting, hate and violenceit has been difficult to remember to be thankful.However, when I read stories of people whostand up and speak outfor justice and truthI become immensely grateful and proud of America.Sign Up For The NPR Daily Newsletter

Catch up on the latest headlines and unique NPR stories, sent every weekday.E-mail address

By subscribing, you agree to NPR’s terms of use and privacy policy.

Freedom to whisper against kingsMy grandmother who carried her green cardin the broken tattoos on her back

I am thankful that other people are still trying to come here.I am thankful for the vastness of our borders and the beauty of our natural lands.

Sunshine streaming softlywhile we sip our morning coffee.But across the oceans our troops fightensuring that we keep our rights,to give us a land of the free.For the first respondersFor hope

I am thankful for America’s history, warts and all.Our past, full of light and dark,Read the historyof heroes and villainsSee our country for what it is.

Free Press and Free speechto speak out against injustices in our country,

For familyFor places to walk safelyplaces to paddlearcades of treesvaried, inexpensive foodtools and workplaceslongtime friends who listentennis courts

Indoor plumbing,

to worship whoever we want,to say whatever we want,to go wherever we want.

for the public libraries.They raise up voices whom others attempt to silence.

for diversity.For differencesMy son is transgender and I am grateful for those who treat HER with respect and kindness.

for Cape May; for parties on the Fourth of July; for anarchist coffee shops; for church-run thrift stores; hole-in-the-wall BBQ joints; Lake Michigan; Vinny’s Pizzeria in the 90s; beer delivery in a snow storm;

for second, third and fourth chances.For forgiveness.I am thankful that my hybrid existence, hinted by my brown skin and slanted eyes, can make sense in America.

For many spectacular parks in our nation–from the huge and awe-inspiring Grand Canyon to the tiny neighborhood park with the small playground and the pretty benches painted by local artists.

I am grateful that America can change, too.for the millions who take to the streets,challenge authority,insist on change,demand justice,resist evil, tell their stories,

Wrought through divisionSustained by freedom’s hopeSeeking reunionI am thankful for America, most of the time.AMERICA LET’S ME CONNECT AND PLAY VIDEOS WITH THE WORLDAMERICA ALLOWS ME TO PLAY BASKETBALLAMERICA GIVES ME A GOOD EDUCATION

Thank you, America,For the mom and pop shops and rest stops.For the back roads and the beaten paths.For the love that greets me when I come home.

For the dream to become,the dream to make better or different,the dream to inspire,the dream of something on the other sideof whatever is facing us in the moment

For You

Tori Whitley-Berry and Jacob Conrad produced and edited the audio story.

]]>Bruce Shrodinger: here kitty, kitty_5__FacebookRESEARCH REPORT: Real Estate at Risk, by State, from Sea Level Rise until 2050https://pottersweal.com/2018/11/13/research-report-real-estate-at-risk-by-state-from-sea-level-rise-until-2050/
Tue, 13 Nov 2018 19:21:05 +0000http://pottersweal.com/2018/11/13/research-report-real-estate-at-risk-by-state-from-sea-level-rise-until-2050/Continue reading →]]>This research study by Climate Central and Zillow, the real estate listing firm, contains a great deal of data and information graphics that we urge you to check out in the original website, below:http://www.climatecentral.org/news/ocean-at-the-door-new-homes-in-harms-way-zillow-analysis-21953#article-comments

Ocean at the Door: New Homes and the Rising Sea

Published: November 13th, 2018

Research Report by Climate Central and Zillow

Recent housing growth rates are faster in high flood risk zones for most coastal states.

RELATED RESOURCES (that can be accessed from the Climate Central website here.) • Interactive map showing risk zones • Sea level tool with results by location: scroll to the “Future Flood Risk to Homes” section of tool after typing a city, county, or state name (For quick links to states, click on the interactive below) • Research brief on the threats to housing stock overall • Full results in two downloadable spreadsheets • Download report PDF

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy slammed into New Jersey, producing a major storm surge and damaging or destroying many thousands of homes. Over the years that followed, builders put up new houses and reconstructed damaged ones — in many areas that will be vulnerable to more flooding in the future.

The post-Sandy rebuilding was a striking example of a broader pattern. Across the United States, coastal communities have recently built tens of thousands of houses in areas at risk of chronic future flooding driven by sea level rise from climate change. That has put homeowners, renters, and investors in danger of steep personal and financial losses in the years ahead. And while municipalities are increasingly developing plans to cope with sea level rise, the pattern of actual recent construction may be a more robust guide to which places are taking the threat most seriously.

In what we believe to be the first country-wide analysis of its kind, Climate Central and Zillow have isolated the number of new homes in low-lying coastal areas in all 24 coastal states, projecting how many will become exposed to chronic ocean flooding over the coming decades — depending on what choices the world makes around greenhouse-gas pollution today.

The results are clear. If the world makes moderate cuts to greenhouse-gas pollution — roughly in line with the Paris agreement on climate, whose targets the international community is not on track to meet — some 10,000 existing homes built after 2009 will be at risk of flooding at least once per year, on average, by 2050. The figures for 2100 are about three times higher — and five times higher if pollution grows unchecked.

Over the last decade, public interest in sea level rise has grown, tidal flooding has increased in many coastal communities, and global attention has coalesced around the dangers of climate change in international negotiations in Copenhagen and Paris. And yet in the years after 2009, the percentage growth rate at which new homes were added inside of America’s highest coastal flood-risk zones outpaced the percentage growth rate outside of those areas — in more than half of the country’s coastal states.

Location, Location, Inundation

By boosting the average water height, sea level rise is projected to make the kinds of intermittent floods that coastal communities see once in the average year reach farther inland than they do today. Those floods can damage and devalue homes, degrade infrastructure, wash out beaches, and interrupt daily life.

Future emissions will shape the extent of those harms — and the number of homes in each coastal region’s “risk zone” — in the years ahead. Unless otherwise noted, this report defines the risk zone as the area exposed to an average of at least one coastal flood per year in 2050, under the moderate emissions cuts known technically as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5, and under the median projections for sea-level rise corresponding to this emissions level as described in Kopp et al. 2017. Other risk zones can be defined with other assumptions, such as unchecked emissions, or by looking to the year 2100, and yield different results. “New homes” refers only to currently existing structures built after 2009 and before 2017 (or before 2016 in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and New York). “New” does not refer to homes that will be built in the future.

New homes in risk zones are not evenly distributed across the country’s coastal states. Local factors, from the size of the population and the condition of the economy to the amount of space available, shape the development of new housing stock in each community. And the size of a risk zone is itself the product of a variety of elements, from land elevation to the presence of protective features such as levees.

Fairly comparing the pattern of new, risky construction across different cities, states or counties, then, requires tracking more than just raw numbers. One way to do this is to compare percentage growth in housing within the flood-risk zone with percentage growth outside of it, producing a single, comparable ratio for each place.

Take the state of New Jersey. After 2009, the housing growth rate was more than three times higher in the coastal flood risk zone than in safer areas. Around 2,700 new homes, worth some $2.6 billion, were put up in the flood-risk zone after that year — most likely driven by reconstruction following Sandy. In Mississippi and Delaware, meanwhile, the ratio of risky growth to less risky growth was around 2.5. And in Florida, where the recent risk zone growth rate has just slightly outpaced the growth rate in safer areas, 908 newly built homes are nevertheless in locations at risk of flooding at least annually by 2050.

Nine other coastal states likewise saw their construction growth rates in the risk zone outpace their growth rates in safer areas. (In addition to the states listed in Table 1, these include Alabama, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.) More than half of the country’s coastal states, in other words, have recently seen higher housing growth rates inside the flood-risk zone than outside of it.

Counties and Cities

Just as the growth in new risk-zone housing is unevenly distributed across states, so it is unevenly distributed within them. There are 23 counties where more than 100 at-risk homes were built after 2009. All of those counties are in ten states: Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

In Ocean County, New Jersey, more homes — about 1,300 — were built in flood-risk zones after 2009 than in any coastal state except New Jersey itself.

29 cities built at least 50 homes in the risk zone after 2009. None built more than Ocean City, New Jersey, a popular resort town in Cape May County, which put up 308 new houses in the risk zone.

The larger cities of Corpus Christi, Texas, Charleston, South Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia, also rank among the cities with the highest number of new homes in areas of future chronic flood risk.

Flooding the Market

This report has so far focused on just one pollution scenario. But other outcomes are possible. Instead of making the kinds of moderate emissions reductions pledged in Paris, the world might achieve deep cuts. Alternatively, humanity could pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere unchecked.

How would these alternatives affect the coastal flood risk to recently built U.S. homes? By 2050, not by much. Moderate cuts to pollution would leave just over 10,000 new homes in the risk zone. Deep cuts in emissions — what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls RCP 2.6 — would trim that figure to just under 10,000. And unchecked pollution, or RCP 8.5, would place a little more than 11,000 homes in areas in danger of at-least-yearly future floods.

By the end of the century, however, there will be massive differences in the dangers that these emissions scenarios pose for coastal homes. Deep cuts would leave 18,000 recently built homes at risk. Moderate reductions akin to those pledged in the Paris agreement would boost that number to 30,000. If greenhouse-gas pollution rises unchecked, 49,000 of today’s new homes would lie in the flood-risk zone by century’s end.

More striking still is that those 49,000 just-built homes would represent a tiny fraction of the total number of homes at flood risk. Unchecked pollution would put a total of 2.5 million existing homes at risk of yearly flooding or worse by 2100. Those properties are currently worth $1.33 trillion — an amount equal to six percent of the U.S. economy.

No state has more to lose from such an outcome than Florida, where 8,000 more new homes are projected to be in the flood-risk zone by century’s end if greenhouse-gas pollution continues unabated than if moderate cuts are achieved. When all home vintages in the state are considered, the difference is even starker. Unchecked pollution would put 730,000 more homes in flood-risk zones than would moderate cuts — and 960,000 more than deep cuts.

Methodology

Sea level and flood projections

This analysis determines the maximum local land elevations that define risk zones by projecting future local sea levels and adding the height above sea level that local floods exceed on average once per year.

Local sea level projections are based on a recent peer-reviewed research paper (Kopp et al. 2017) building off of global projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and emerging research on the potential instability of Antarctic ice sheets (DeConto and Pollard 2016), which could lead to significantly more sea level rise in the second half of the century. Climate pollution scenarios modeled include “unchecked pollution” (technically, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP 8.5), “moderate carbon cuts” (RCP 4.5), and “deep carbon cuts” (RCP 2.6), this last choice meaning a peak in emissions near the year 2020 followed by a sharp decline to zero near 2070 and then by net negative emissions. The sea level model was run for thousands of simulations given each scenario. Median projections under each scenario for the years 2050 and 2100 are used, reflecting mid-range sea level sensitivity to climate pollution. Lesser or more severe outcomes are possible, with 5th and 95th percentile results available in the Risk Finder tool (scroll to the “Future Flood Risk to Homes” section of the tool after typing a city, county, or state name, and click on the gear-shaped settings icon at the top right of the panel).

Annual average flood levels were derived using methods from Tebaldi et al. 2012, with water level station data updated through the end of 2015 for 71 stations around the United States. This approach assumes no future changes in the frequency or severity of coastal storms or tides, as compared to past decades. Some research indicates climate change will worsen future storms. Storm surge associated with major hurricanes has already been increasing over the last century.

Defining risk zones

“Risk zones” are first classified as areas with elevations below local projected sea levels plus annual flood heights. Assessment is based on accurate, high-resolution, lidar-derived elevation data provided principally by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA). Initial risk zones are then refined by removing low-lying areas that appear to be protected from the ocean by natural topography or by levees. This approach is called using a “bathtub model,” since it relies only on how still water would fill a landscape, like water filling a tub, without accounting for factors such as wind, waves, or rain that give actual floods dynamic and uneven surfaces. Bathtub models are perfectly appropriate for mapping pure sea level projections, and make reasonable approximations for mild floods, such as annual ones.

Dynamics play a larger role in rarer and more violent storms, so bathtubs are less appropriate for these. More sophisticated methods using hydrodynamic simulations can take many factors into account that bathtub models cannot, but require large amounts of computing power to characterize well the thousands of combinations of sea level, tides, wind, waves, and rain that any location might experience in the future.

Levees, walls, dams, or other features may protect some areas, especially at lower elevations. Data limitations, such as an incomplete inventory of levees and a lack of levee height data, make assessing the protection afforded by levees difficult. Levees are particularly prevalent in Louisiana and in the Bay Area and San Joaquin delta region of Northern California. Missing or mischaracterized levee data in these areas may have important effects on results, including known overestimates of exposure due to missing levee data in Northern California. We use data from the FEMA/USACE Midterm Levee Inventory for our national flood control structure dataset, and supplement this with local data from Louisiana and Massachusetts. This analysis does not account for future erosion, marsh migration, or construction. As is general best practice, local detail should be verified with a site visit.

We assume levees are always high and strong enough for flood protection. However, the American Society of Civil Engineers rated only eight percent of levees as in “acceptable” condition, and some areas and assets that appear to be protected by levees, ridges, or other features may not actually be protected. Areas may have hidden connections through porous bedrock geology, as is common in South Florida, another area with plentiful levees that line drainage channels and canals. Low-lying areas may also be connected by channels, breaks in levees or seawalls, or drainage passages that are not captured by the elevation data, such as sewers. There is further no guarantee that existing levees will be maintained through 2050 or 2100. On the other hand, new defenses could also be built within these timeframes.

Housing data

Homes whose geographic coordinates lie within or outside of risk zones were separately counted and their values, which were estimated by Zillow, were summed. Zillow provided location, value data (Zestimates), and build years for homes built through 2016 (for Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and New York) or 2017 (for all other coastal states). Separate tallies were made for homes built in 2010 or later, versus 2009 or earlier. The data do not include build year for some homes; these homes were included in analyses for all homes. Only homes with known build year were included in calculations of housing growth rate, which was computed as homes built in 2010 or later, divided by homes built in 2009 or earlier.

Geographic coordinates of homes within the Zillow database may also contain errors, especially in low-density rural areas. However, we have empirically found such errors to be virtually random with nearly zero bias, so exposure totals aggregated to larger administrative boundaries, such as cities and counties, are expected to accurately reflect actual vulnerability.

Zillow property and Zestimate data were refined to ensure a set of unique properties with complete addresses and home valuations (Zestimates). Zillow data include single-family homes, condominiums, and other homes in multi-unit properties, such as duplexes and triplexes — in other words, units where the tax parcel is a single dwelling unit. Buildings zoned for commercial residential use, such as apartment buildings, are not included, and so total housing counts using these data are generally lower than corresponding estimates using the 2010 census.

Address and built year data were provided by Zillow through the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX). More information on accessing the data can be found at http://www.zillow.com/ztrax. Proprietary Zillow data, such as Zestimates, were provided under strict confidentiality.

Report image: DVIDSHUB/flickr

]]>Bruce Shrodinger: here kitty, kittyPlaying Catch Up in the War Against Domestic Terrorismhttps://pottersweal.com/2018/11/03/playing-catch-up-in-the-war-against-domestic-terrorism/
Sat, 03 Nov 2018 19:38:04 +0000http://pottersweal.com/2018/11/03/playing-catch-up-in-the-war-against-domestic-terrorism/Continue reading →]]>This article from Janet Reitman appeared in the NY Times Magazine — I’d urge you to read it there (in hard copy or the link here —<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/magazine/FBI-charlottesville-white-nationalism-far-right.html> — for the graphics, but the information is important enough that I thought it worth copying the text:

U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism.Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It.

The first indication to Lt. Dan Stout that law enforcement’s handling of white supremacy was broken came in September 2017, as he was sitting in an emergency-operations center in Gainesville, Fla., preparing for the onslaught of Hurricane Irma and watching what felt like his thousandth YouTube video of the recent violence in Charlottesville, Va. Jesus Christ, he thought, studying the footage in which crowds of angry men, who had gathered to attend or protest the Unite the Right rally, set upon one another with sticks and flagpole spears and flame throwers and God knows what else. A black man held an aerosol can, igniting the spray, and in retaliation, a white man picked up his gun, pointed it toward the black man and fired it at the ground. The Virginia state troopers, inexplicably, stood by and watched. Stout fixated on this image, wondering what kind of organizational failure had led to the debacle. He had one month to ensure that the same thing didn’t happen in Gainesville.

Before that August, Stout, a 24-year veteran of the Gainesville police force, had never heard of Richard Spencer and knew next to nothing about his self-declared alt-right movement, or of their “anti-fascist” archnemesis known as Antifa. Then, on the Monday after deadly violence in Charlottesville, in which a protester was killed when a driver plowed his car into the crowd, Stout learned to his horror that Spencer was planning a speech at the University of Florida. He spent weeks frantically trying to get up to speed, scouring far-right and anti-fascist websites and videos, each click driving him further into despair. Aside from the few white nationalists who had been identified by the media or on Twitter, Stout had no clue who most of these people were, and neither, it seemed, did anyone else in law enforcement.

There were no current intelligence reports he could find on the alt-right, the sometimes-violent fringe movement that embraces white nationalism and a range of racist positions. The state police couldn’t offer much insight. Things were equally bleak at the federal level. Whatever the F.B.I. knew (which wasn’t a lot, Stout suspected), they weren’t sharing. The Department of Homeland Security, which produced regular intelligence and threat assessments for local law enforcement, had only scant material on white supremacists, all of it vague and ultimately not much help. Local politicians, including the governor, were also in the dark. This is like a Bermuda Triangle of intelligence, Stout thought, incredulous. He reached out to their state partners. “So you’re telling us that there’s nothing? No names we can plug into the automatic license-plate readers? No players with a propensity for violence? No one you have in the system? Nothing?’’

One of those coming to Gainesville was William Fears, a 31-year-old from Houston. Fears, who online went by variations of the handle Antagonizer, was one of the most dedicated foot soldiers of the alt-right. Countless YouTube videos had captured his progress over the past year as he made his way from protest to protest across several states, flinging Nazi salutes, setting off smoke bombs and, from time to time, attacking people. Fears was also a felon. He had spent six years in prison for aggravated kidnapping in a case involving his ex-girlfriend, and now he had an active warrant for his arrest, after his new girlfriend accused him of assault less than two weeks earlier. On Oct. 18, the night before the event, Fears and a few others from Houston’s white-nationalist scene got in Fears’s silver Jeep Patriot for the 14-hour drive. Fears’s friend Tyler TenBrink, who pleaded guilty to assault in 2014, posted video from their trip on his Facebook page. There were four men, two of them felons, and two nine-millimeter handguns. “Texans always carry,” Fears said later.

Gainesville would be Spencer’s first major public appearance since the violence of the Unite the Right rally two months before, and the city, a progressive enclave in the heart of deep-red north Florida, was on edge. Anticipating chaos, Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency — prompting Spencer to tweet out an image of his head making its way across the Atlantic toward Florida: “Hurricane Spencer.” A few days before the event, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement sent out a small, bound “threat book” of about 20 or so figures, most of them openly affiliated with Spencer or with anti-fascist groups, which Stout knew from his own research meant they weren’t the people to worry about. Anonymous online chatter on sites like 4chan, meanwhile, described armed right-wing militants coming to Gainesville to test Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Stout envisioned 20 white supremacists with long guns. We’re screwed, he thought.

By the morning of Oct. 19, a fortress of security, costing the University of Florida and police forces roughly half a million dollars, had been built around the western edge of the 2,000-acre campus and the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, where Spencer and his entourage arrived that afternoon. More than 1,100 state troopers and local cops stood on alert, with another 500 on standby. There were officers posted on rooftops. Police helicopters buzzed the skies. The Florida National Guard had been activated off-site, and a line of armored vehicles sat in reserve. Hundreds of journalists from around the United States and abroad were in attendance, anticipating another Charlottesville.

Some 2,500 protesters had descended on the small area cordoned off for the event, where they confronted a handful of white supremacists, most of them Spencer groupies like Fears and his friends. “Basically, I’m just fed up with the fact that I’m cisgendered, I’m a white male and I lean right, toward the Republican side, and I get demonized,” Colton Fears, Will’s 28-year-old brother, who was wearing an SS pin, told HuffPost. TenBrink, also 28, told The Washington Post that he had come to support Spencer because after Charlottesville, where he was seen and photographed, he had been threatened by the “radical left.” He seemed agitated by the thousands of protesters. “This is a mess,” he told The Gainesville Sun. “It appears that the only answer left is violence, and nobody wants that.”

But Will Fears told reporters he came to Gainesville to intimidate the protesters. “It’s always been socially acceptable to punch a Nazi, to attack people if they have right-wing political leanings,” he said. “We’re starting to push back.” He went on: “We want to show our teeth a little bit because, you know, we’re not to be taken lightly.”

The Spencer speech turned out to be a bust, thanks to an audience so determined to drown him out that at one point they erupted in a chant of “Orange! Blue! Orange! Blue!” as if at a Gators football game. Afterward, the crowd left the auditorium and flooded back onto Hull Road, the long avenue leading toward the center of campus. Thousands of protesters surrounded the small group of Spencer acolytes. TenBrink, a sinewy young man wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, was particularly overwhelmed and jumped a barricade to escape the angry crowd. The police put him in handcuffs and escorted him into a parking garage. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, they uncuffed TenBrink and walked him out of the garage and toward the parking lot, and let him go. Neither TenBrink nor his friends were in the threat book.

There are several versions of what happened after TenBrink was released. It was about 5:15 p.m. The Texans drove down Archer Avenue, the broad street bordering the south edge of campus, about a mile from the secured area. A group of protesters were sitting at a bus stop. The men in the Jeep started shouting “Heil Hitler!” according to the police report and several witness statements. “Do you know my friend Heil? Heil Hitler? Get it?” The men started throwing Nazi salutes.

One of the protesters had come to Gainesville armed with a retractable baton. When the Texans began to harass them, he grabbed his baton and struck a window of the S.U.V. “My life and the lives of those around me was at risk,” he told the police. Will Fears jumped out. “I’m about to beat this dude up with his own fricking expandable baton,” he later recalled.

Suddenly, witnesses said, a man later identified as TenBrink jumped from the vehicle holding a handgun. “Shoot them!” the Texans were heard yelling. TenBrink pointed the gun at the protester.

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

‘This is what public demonstration looks like in an era when white nationalism isn’t on the fringes, but on the inside of the political mainstream.’

In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a “very challenged young man.” Also last spring, another white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow’s apartment doubled as a “homemade explosives laboratory.” There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow’s home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow’s clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn’t mean he was a white supremacist. “He could have been an individual that was doing research,” the local police chief said.

In this atmosphere of apparent indifference on the part of government officials and law enforcement, a virulent, and violent, far-right movement has grown and metastasized. To combat it, some officials have suggested prosecuting related crimes through expansion of the government’s counterterrorism powers — creating a special “domestic terrorism” statute, for instance, which currently doesn’t exist. But a report released on Oct. 31 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School argues that the creation of such a statute could easily be abused to target “protesters and political dissidents instead of terrorists,” and that law enforcement already has ample authority to prosecute domestic terrorism: “Congress must require that counterterrorism resource decisions be based on objective evaluations of the physical harm different groups pose to human life, rather than on political considerations that prioritize the safety of some communities over others.”

The report also calls out the Justice Department for its “blind spot” when it comes to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein conceded earlier in the week. During a conference on Oct. 29, Rosenstein said that according to the latest F.B.I. crime report, “88 percent of agencies that provide hate-crimes data to the F.B.I. reported zero hate crimes in 2016.” The Justice Department was reviewing the accuracy of the reports, he noted. “Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening.”

In 2016, the latest full year of data available from the F.B.I., more than 6,100 hate-crime incidents were reported, 4,270 of them crimes against people (as opposed to, say, defacing property). And yet only 27 federal hate-crime defendants were prosecuted that year. “The F.B.I. knows how many bank robberies there were last year,” says Michael German, an author of the Brennan Center report and a former F.B.I. agent, “but it doesn’t know how many white supremacists attacked people, how many they injured or killed.”

More concerning to German, though, is that law enforcement seems uninterested in policing the violent far right. During the first year after Donald Trump’s election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar. During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

Chapman was one of a number of known white supremacists to align with the Proud Boys, a nationalist men’s movement founded in 2016 by the anti-immigrant “Western chauvinist” Gavin McInnes, a founder of Vice Media. There was also the Rise Above Movement (RAM), an alt-right group composed largely of ex-cons, many with ties to Southern California’s racist skinhead movement. Over the past two years, each group engaged in violent confrontations with their ideological enemies — a lengthy list including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, nonwhite immigrants, members of the L.G.B.T. community and the progressive left — and generally escaped punishment. This changed to a degree over the past few weeks when, after a yearlong campaign by journalists at ProPublica and other media outlets, federal prosecutors filed charges against eight members of RAM, including two of its leaders. Similarly, after a pressure campaign on social media, the New York Police Department arrested and charged six members of the Proud Boys in connection with an assault after a speech by McInnes at a Republican club in Manhattan on Oct. 12. On his podcast, McInnes noted that he has “a lot of support” in the N.Y.P.D. (The police commissioner denies this.)

In at least one instance, the police have in fact coordinated with far-right groups. In 2017, a law-enforcement official stationed at a rally in downtown Portland, Ore., turned to a member of a far-right militia group and asked for his assistance in cuffing a left-wing counterprotester, who had been tackled by a Proud Boy.

“This is what public demonstration looks like in an era when white nationalism isn’t on the fringes, but on the inside of the political mainstream,” says Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who now leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino. During the run-up to some of last year’s major events in places like Charlottesville or Berkeley, he notes, “there was an unending stream of violent themed chatter and an almost choreographed exchange of web threats between antagonists across wide geographic expanses” that earned barely a nod from law enforcement.

During a congressional hearing in the wake of Charlottesville, Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., told lawmakers last September that the bureau had “about 1,000” open domestic-terror investigations, roughly the same number of investigations the bureau had open on ISIS. The bureau has not provided information on how many of those investigations pertained to white nationalists or other far-right extremists, as opposed to left-wing or “black-identity extremist” groups, nor whether they are full-blown investigations, preliminary inquiries or “assessments.” The F.B.I. has also responded to criticism that it has failed to address hateful or threatening messages on social media. The F.B.I. said in a statement: “The F.B.I. does not and cannot police ideologies under the First Amendment.” But looking at prosecutions, German says, “it’s clear that many of the people targeted for investigation for allegedly supporting the Islamic State were initially identified because of something they said online.”

There are serious civil liberties concerns with any broad surveillance of social media, German says. What’s also true, he notes, is that the volume of white-supremacist-related content is overwhelmingly high. “There are relatively few Americans voicing their support for ISIS online. But there are millions of racists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, homophobes and xenophobes who engage in eliminationist rhetoric about the communities of people they fear and hate every day on social media and radio talk shows. Even if the F.B.I. wanted to monitor this hate speech, they wouldn’t have the resources, or any way to distinguish between those who talk and those who act.”

Levin believes that the Justice Department could be more flexible in pursuing these groups without violating First Amendment concerns. Just as they do with ISIS supporters, law-enforcement agencies would be within their legal rights to monitor, analyze and share any of the publicly available intelligence on white supremacists or hate groups that suggests violent confrontations. “The problem is not that we rightly scrutinize violent Salafist extremism,” Levin says, “but that we do so while materially ignoring domestic white nationalists or those on their fringes who also represent a violent threat.”

When we first spoke this August, Levin noted the continued ascendance of the far right, even after many of its members went underground after Charlottesville. “The rocket ship is still twirling,” he said. Levin predicted that the next big wave of activity wouldn’t be around mega-rallies but around what he calls “aggressive maneuvers” by loners or small cells. A series of violent outbursts in a single week in October made his prediction seem prescient.

In just seven days, a Florida man who lived out of a van plastered with stickers, including one of Hillary Clinton’s face in cross hairs, is reported to have sent a series of pipe bombs to at least a dozen of Trump’s critics. Two days after the first package appeared, a middle-aged white man, having tried unsuccessfully to break into a black church near Louisville, Ky., reportedly shot and killed two elderly African-Americans at a Kroger. “Whites don’t kill whites,” the man reportedly told an armed white man who confronted him. Then, at week’s end, a man who posted on Gab, the alt-right’s preferred social-media site, about a “kike infestation” interrupted services at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and several handguns; he was charged with murdering 11 people and injuring several more, including police officers. The Anti-Defamation League believed it to be the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history.

Law enforcement’s inability to reckon with the far right is a problem that goes back generations in this country, and the roots of this current crisis can be traced back more than a decade. With violent political messaging emanating from the White House and echoed throughout the conservative media and social-media landscapes, Levin only expects more attacks. “What we need to worry about is the guy who is riled up by this rhetoric and decides to go out and do something on his own,” he told me in August. “We have people who are ticking time bombs.”

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued a report warning of a rise in “right-wing extremism.” The department is the country’s largest law-enforcement body, created after Sept. 11 to prevent and respond to various threats, most specifically those connected to terrorism. While most of its counterterrorism focus has been on preventing Islamist terrorist attacks, the department is also supposed to examine domestic threats, like those coming from violent white supremacists, antigovernment militants and single-issue hate groups, like radical anti-abortion activists.

The author of the report was a senior intelligence analyst named Daryl Johnson, who ran a small Homeland Security domestic-terrorism unit. Two years earlier, in January 2007, Johnson was sitting in his bland second-floor office when he received a call from a contact at the Capitol Police. A first-term Illinois senator named Barack Obama was planning to announce that he was running for president. “Curious if you’ve heard any threatening chatter,” the officer said.

This was the first time Johnson had heard of Obama, and he didn’t know about any threats, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any. Though white-extremist groups had been fairly quiet in the years since Sept. 11, Johnson saw this as a temporary lull. These people never truly went away, he thought; they just needed the right motivation to energize them.

“What do you think’s going to happen when the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists get wind of this?” the officer asked.

Johnson didn’t skip a beat: “I think it’s going to be the perfect recruiting and radicalization tool for white supremacy.”

At 38, Johnson spoke with the earnestness of an Eagle Scout, which he was. He was also a registered Republican who grew up in a small Mormon community in rural Virginia where millennialism, or end-times theology, was a core concept. During the 1980s, when Johnson was still in high school, far-right separatists took to the Ozarks or to strongholds in rural Idaho, where they stockpiled food and weapons and conducted paramilitary training in preparation for the biblical “last days.” Some, like the Aryan Nations, whose members embraced the racist Christian Identity philosophy, spawned domestic terror cells like the Order, which waged a brutal campaign of bombings, armed robberies and murder, culminating with the June 1984 assassination of Alan Berg, the prominent Jewish radio talk-show host who frequently spoke of flushing out the latent anti-Semitism in Denver’s conservative community.

Years of law-enforcement investigation and infiltration of right-wing terror groups commenced, and by the early 1990s, many of the movement’s most violent members were dead or in jail. But the government standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Tex., energized a new generation of separatists, Patriot militias — the forerunners of today’s antigovernment militia groups — as well as individuals like Timothy McVeigh, who made his way through various antigovernment and racist ideologies and organizations under the radar of law enforcement, before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The deaths of 168 people, including 19 children, at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building brought the threat of domestic terrorism by white Americans into stark relief. In the aftermath, the F.B.I. added many more agents to work domestic terrorism cases, and Attorney General Janet Reno created a special task force to investigate domestic terrorism. But by the end of 2001, the dominant business of the F.B.I., as well as every other federal law enforcement body, was international terrorism. Years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the supposed threat posed by Al Qaeda and other Muslim groups continued to drive policy, notably at the Department of Homeland Security, which Johnson, who started his career in Army intelligence, joined in 2005. At the time, he later recalled, he was the only analyst exclusively working on non-Islamic domestic threats. By 2007, he had put together a small team of analysts who began to scour extremist websites and message boards. What they found alarmed them.

The militant far right was enjoying a renaissance, thanks to the internet. Hundreds of militia recruitment and paramilitary training videos had sprung up on YouTube, along with promotions for weapons training and, to Johnson’s horror, bomb-making manuals. Between October 2007 and March 2008, Johnson and his unit documented the formation of 45 new antigovernment militia groups, which he saw as highly significant given that before fall 2007, these sorts of groups had been on the decline. Some white-supremacist groups, seizing upon the anti-immigration rhetoric that was then fomenting, created violent video games aimed at exploiting public fear of “illegals” streaming over the border.

By the spring of 2008, Obama’s candidacy, just as Johnson predicted, had become a lightning rod for white supremacists and other hate groups. As the campaign moved into its final months, law-enforcement agencies intercepted at least two assassination plots against Obama. Other threats and racist posts flooded the internet, where Johnson’s team noticed a sharp increase in membership on Stormfront, the first major white-nationalist website. The site added 32,000 new users within the first three months after Obama’s inauguration, nearly double the number it added in 2008.

Johnson and his team compiled their findings into a report, which they were still working on when Obama tapped Janet Napolitano, formerly the governor of Arizona, as the new secretary of Homeland Security. Napolitano “got it” when it came to white supremacy, says Juliette Kayyem, who served as the department’s assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs in 2009 and 2010. While serving as Arizona’s attorney general, Napolitano coordinated the investigation of one of Timothy McVeigh’s accomplices. Now, concerned that a reinvigorated white-supremacist movement could pose a threat to the country’s first African-American president and to citizens, Napolitano began asking her intelligence analysts about a rise in lone-wolf “right-wing extremism,” a term commonly used in the counterterrorism world to refer to the radical beliefs of fringe players on the right of the political spectrum.

In March 2009, Johnson says he and a few colleagues from the F.B.I. briefed Napolitano on their findings, theorizing that heightened stress because of the continuing financial crisis, coupled with the election of the first black president, created a “unique driver” for individual radicalization and antigovernment and white-supremacist recruitment. Military veterans, including those returning after multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, might be particularly susceptible candidates, they noted, a prediction based on a 2008 F.B.I. assessment that found 203 individuals with military experience who had joined white-supremacist groups since Sept. 11, 2001. It was a tiny number given the overall United States veteran population, which at the time was close to 24 million. It was also a small percentage of the thousands of white supremacists the F.B.I. estimated were active. But the “prestige” that those with military or tactical skills held within white-supremacist groups made their influence much greater, the F.B.I. argued.

Johnson remembers Napolitano, sitting at the conference table, soberly flipping through the PowerPoint slides and thanking the analysts for the presentation. A few days later, the Department of Homeland Security released its report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” which was distributed across the government and local law-enforcement agencies.

On April 11, 2009, four days after his report was released, Johnson was at home in West Virginia when a PDF of the document was posted on the website of the syndicated conservative radio host Roger Hedgecock. A link to the PDF was also posted on a blog maintained by the Oath Keepers, the antigovernment group composed of numerous law-enforcement officials. “FORWARD THIS TO EVERY AMERICAN!” read the post, which Johnson suspected had been written by a member of the law-enforcement community. “YOU are now a dangerous terrorist according to the Obama administration.”

By the next day, news of a “chilling” report from the department was making its way through far-right message boards and the blogosphere, where it was picked apart by conspiracy sites like Infowars, which deemed it evidence of a deep-state plot. More mainstream right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin considered it, in Malkin’s words, an “Obama D.H.S. hit job” on conservatives. Some progressives also had concerns about the report’s “dangerously vague and speculative” nature, as a Mother Jones correspondent, James Ridgeway, wrote, warning that “civil libertarians of all stripes” should be nervous and raising the specter of government surveillance.

From the perspective of many people inside the department, the report was “exactly what the department is supposed to do, which is inform and educate our stakeholders about what we see as a threat,” Kayyem says. “This was not a political document.”

‘The problem is not that we rightly scrutinize violent Salafist extremism, but that we do so while materially ignoring domestic white nationalists or those on their fringes who also represent a violent threat.’

Congressional Republicans, answering to a nascent Tea Party movement and the American Legion, soon took issue with the label “right-wing extremism,” which John Boehner, then minority leader of the House, charged was being used by the Department of Homeland Security “to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.” Boehner was particularly bothered by the report’s mention of veterans. “To characterize men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable,” he said in a statement. Several G.O.P. lawmakers called for Napolitano’s resignation, as well as that of Johnson, who, in their view, equated conservatives with terrorists.

Johnson was appalled. “I never anticipated such an aggressive, vile backlash,” he told me recently. It was puzzling: Just a few months before his April 2009 report was published, the department released an assessment of the cyber threat posed by “left-wing extremists,” like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. Legislators, the media and the public at large — including progressives — had no objection to that terminology. But the political firestorm over “right-wing extremism” had caused such an uproar that the Department of Homeland Security ultimately avoided using ideological terminology like “right-wing.” A few weeks after the report was released, Napolitano formally apologized to veterans, and after intense pressure from veterans’ groups, the department withdrew the report.

Afterward, the administration tried to depoliticize the issue. Obama had been elected promising to improve relations with the Muslim world, though this soon provided an opening for conspiracy-minded Republicans like Representative Louie Gohmert, the Texas congressman who once insinuated that Mohamed Elibiary, an adviser to Obama’s national-security team, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. During the Bush administration, the word “terrorism” had become almost synonymous with Islam. Now, as one former policy adviser recalls, “the Obama people were adamant that it couldn’t just be about jihadis.”

They adopted a new, less ideological lexicon. Terrorism became “violent extremism,” which suggested behavior. The administration also came up with a new paradigm of “ideologically motivated violence” that ostensibly could apply to any form of extremism, not just Islamic terrorism. The Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department would develop “countering violent extremism” programs that focused on outreach and community engagement, not warrantless surveillance, though in practice they were still an effort to identify and root out jihadist elements from American Muslim communities, just as they had been during the Bush administration.

At the same time, most of the work exclusively focused on domestic extremism stopped at the Department of Homeland Security. “I blame an entire political apparatus led by Republicans that made calling something ‘right-wing extremism’ a political statement,” says Kayyem, who notes the paradox of G.O.P. leaders’ attacking Democrats for refusing to use the phrase “radical Islamic extremism.” “They’d say if you can’t say it, you can’t fight it,” she says. “But it cuts both ways. If you’re not allowed to say that white supremacy is a form of radicalization, then how are you going to stop it?”

Johnson’s 2009 report proved prescient. In February 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that in the previous year, the number of domestic hate groups in the United States had reached more than 1,000 for the first time. The antigovernment Patriot movement gained 300 new groups over the same time period, a jump of over 60 percent. Every sphere of the far right was being energized at the same time. There was also an uptick in so-called lone wolves, who held extremist views but associated with no specific organization. In May 2010, a year after Johnson’s report was released, a father and son from Ohio, members of a little-known antigovernment movement called “sovereign citizens,” shot and killed two police officers during a traffic stop in West Memphis, Ark. It was the 12th attack or foiled plot by white-extremist “lone wolves” since 2009, almost all of which received little publicity.

The United States attorney from Western Arkansas, Conner Eldridge, was one of a number of Justice Department prosecutors who felt the department had given short shrift to domestic terrorism. Quietly, Eldridge began to network with United States attorneys from states with a history of white-supremacist activity. They pressed the Justice Department for more resources. “Our thesis was, hey, let’s focus on domestic terrorism at an equal level as we’re focusing on international terrorism, because they’re both terrorism,” Eldridge told me recently. “But we consistently confronted, at every level, a sort of lack of attention to domestic terrorism. The day-to-day focus was on the next potential ISIS attack.”

Back in Washington, weeks would go by with the daily national threat briefings rarely if ever discussing possible domestic threats from the far right. At the F.B.I., counterterrorism agents candidly admitted that domestic terrorism was seen as a backwater and that the only path to advancement was through international terrorism cases. In a recent report on law enforcement’s evaluation of Muslim versus right-wing extremism, a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, noted that in 2008 and 2009 — the only years for which figures were made public — fewer than 350 of the F.B.I.’s 2,000 counterterrorism agents were assigned to domestic terrorism.

After a series of violent attacks by white supremacists, including on a Jewish community center and a nearby retirement home in Overland Park, Kan., Attorney General Eric Holder announced in 2014 that he was reconvening the Justice Department’s Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee. The group hadn’t met in 13 years. “It wasn’t the same as it had been before, but it was something,” says Eldridge, who was tapped to head the committee, which included representatives from about 15 law-enforcement agencies and five Justice Department divisions, including the F.B.I. and the U.S. Marshals. “But we had no budget, no staff, and we had no person whose sole job was to run the committee.”

The ceaseless focus on ISIS and Al Qaeda filtered down to local law enforcement. The administration’s much-touted “countering violent extremism” agenda was directed at various threats. But “the language heavily focused on recruitment and radicalization by ISIS and Al Qaeda,” recalls Nate Snyder, a counterterrorism adviser to the Obama administration at the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 through 2017. As early as 2010, he says, his office was receiving calls from police officers asking for help in many Southern and Midwestern states. “They’d be like, ‘Thanks for that stuff on Al Qaeda, but what I really need to know is how to handle the Hammerskin population in my jurisdiction,’ ” he says, referring to the white-supremacist skinhead group.Continue reading the main storyPhotoA supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer at a rally in Portland, Ore., in September 2017. Credit Mark Peterson/Redux

In 2011, the White House described the threat of Al Qaeda and its affiliates as the “pre-eminent security threat to our country.” By 2013, a new threat had emerged: so-called homegrown violent extremists, or H.V.E.s, a category of people who, though born in the United States, were inspired by a nondomestic ideology to commit violence. H.V.E.s, who tended to be Muslim, were not to be mistaken for domestic terrorists, who by definition were not only Americans but also driven by a domestic ideology like white supremacy. And yet the two were often conflated, and therefore “homegrowns” were also perceived as domestic terrorists: the Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; the perpetrators of the San Bernardino massacre or the mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando. Dylann Roof, born in South Carolina, whose homegrown racism was nurtured on neo-Nazi websites like The Daily Stormer, was not, in this context, a domestic terrorist, nor were any of his beliefs seen as indicative of “violent extremism.” His shooting spree in a church in Charleston, in which he killed nine African-Americans, was interpreted as something else. What drove him, authorities said, was hate. He was a murderer.

This dichotomy plagued Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who served as ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee. For years, Thompson pressed both the administration and fellow members of Congress to be more outspoken on domestic terrorism. “The silence was almost deafening when it came to raising any of those issues in Congress,” he says. “And the administration had this do-nothing approach. They kept telling us, well, we see that white supremacy is a problem, but there’s no way we can get ourselves involved in this because they won’t talk to us.”

It was a curious response from an administration whose “C.V.E.” agenda supposedly addressed all types of ideologically motivated violence. “I really suspect they did some polling and found out that there were certain things an African-American president couldn’t talk about,” one former adviser said. “I think they didn’t want to poke the bear.”This approach was most evident with Obama’s second Homeland Security chief, Jeh Johnson, who came to the department in 2013, after a three-year sojourn as general counsel to the Defense Department, where he provided legal authority for the drone-strike program. During Johnson’s tenure, Nate Snyder says, his office received calls from evangelical pastors worried about far-right recruitment in their congregations. There was also concern about reports of white supremacy in the military.

Johnson, who told me that fear of another ISIS-style attack kept him up at night, held regular round tables with imams and other members of the Islamic community. He resisted the pressure from some members of his staff, and some in Congress, like Thompson, to make similar overtures to communities concerned about antigovernment or white-supremacist groups. He thought it would be absurd to hold round tables with sovereign citizens and white supremacists. “I didn’t think that would have been a very effective use of my time to try,” he told me.

Johnson never called Dylann Roof a domestic terrorist, a phrase commonly applied to Timothy McVeigh. “If there was ever an opportunity to define white extremists as domestic terrorists, Dylann Roof was it,” Snyder says. “But people went back and forth, and it went down the same careful deliberation that happens with active shooters: Maybe it was a mental-health issue. Maybe he was ‘disturbed.’ Maybe he had a predisposition to violence.”

When I spoke to Johnson, he felt it was not his place to call Roof a terrorist. There isn’t a crime of “domestic terrorism” to charge someone with. “There is a certain type of violent extremism that is by nature more of a matter for law enforcement, and another that is about engaging communities at the local level,” he said. But the country’s chief law-enforcement official at the time, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, also didn’t call Roof a terrorist — though she did note that his mass shooting, which she was prosecuting as a hate crime, seemed to meet the definition of terrorism. “Hate crimes are the original domestic terrorism,” she said. James Comey, then director of the F.B.I., wasn’t sure. Terrorism, he stated in June 2015, was “more of a political act,” and he didn’t see the Charleston shooting as political. Even after a racist manifesto Roof penned surfaced online stating his intent to “protect the white race” by instigating a race war, Comey still wasn’t sure it met the definition. “I only operate in a legal framework,” he told HuffPost.

The refusal to name the attack as “terrorism” was, in some critics’ eyes, a crucial misstep that would have far broader implications. “I was very pleased when the Obama administration started and said, We’re not going to use the phrase ‘war on terror,’ ” says Erroll Southers, a former F.B.I. agent and now director of the Safe Communities Institute at the University of Southern California. “I think the Obama people decided, O.K., we’re not going to call it ‘terrorism,’ thinking it was a good thing. The problem was they didn’t realize how much it emboldened the other side and gave them political cover.”

In the months following Donald Trump’s inauguration, security analysts noted with increasing alarm what seemed to be a systematic erosion of the Department of Homeland Security’s analytic and operational capabilities with regard to countering violent extremism. It began with the appointment of a new national-security team. Like their counterparts now running immigration policy, the team came from the fringe of conservative politics, some of them with connections to Islamophobic think tanks and organizations like ACT for America or the Center for Security Policy, whose founder, Frank Gaffney, was Washington’s most prominent peddler of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.

In addition to Gaffney, whose biased and statistically flawed data on the “Muslim threat” became the premise for Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, there were other ideological fellow travelers like Sebastian and Katharine Gorka, the husband-and-wife national-security team. Sebastian Gorka became a senior White House adviser, and Katharine Gorka became a senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security. During the transition, Sebastian Gorka predicted the demise of “C.V.E.,” which he suggested was a fuzzy, politically correct approach to a problem — terrorism — that needed a better fix. Shortly afterward, Katharine Gorka, who once criticized the Obama administration for “allowing Islamists to dictate national-security policy,” made it clear, Nate Snyder recalls, that she didn’t like the phrase “countering violent extremism.” From now on, the mission would be focused on “radical Islamic terrorism,” the White House’s go-to phrase, which, as Sebastian Gorka later explained, was intended to “jettison the political correctness of the last eight years.”

‘What we need to worry about is the guy who is riled up by this rhetoric and decides to go out and do something on his own.’

A surreal scene, replicated in nearly every department and agency, soon began to play out inside the Department of Homeland Security. George Selim, a longtime national-security expert in both the Bush and Obama administrations who headed the Office of Community Partnerships, which worked with local government and civic groups on C.V.E. efforts, noted that as the months passed, “it was clear that there were fewer and fewer of the career civil servants at the table for critical policy decisions.” Some political appointees seemed to have virtually no experience with the issues they had been tapped to advise on. Katharine Gorka, as her own LinkedIn biography notes, had never held a public-sector job before joining the department, nor did she seem to have any practical experience in national security, or law enforcement, or intelligence. Another new senior Homeland Security official, the retired Navy officer Frank Wuco, had made a career of lecturing to the military about the jihadi mind-set, often while role-playing as a member of the Taliban in a Pashtun hat and kaffiyeh. “That’s who was trying to tell me he understands the threat,” an official said dryly.

By February 2017, after the Trump administration issued its first executive order trying to ban citizens of Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, several American Muslim groups decided to reject federal C.V.E. grant money they were awarded under the Obama administration out of concern over the new administration’s framing of the issue. That March, the White House froze the $10 million the previous administration had allotted for the grants, pending review. While that review was underway, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. issued a joint intelligence bulletin, dated May 10, warning that white supremacists might pose “a threat of lethal violence” over the next year. The report, which some analysts said reflected a fraction of the actual numbers, said that white supremacists “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 . . . more than any other domestic extremist movement.”

At the end of June, the Department of Homeland Security withheld grant money from several previously approved applicants whose focus was on studying extremists’ online networks and helping both white supremacists and Muslim extremists leave their movements. Though the total budget for C.V.E. was minuscule given the department’s overall grant budget, rejecting those programs nonetheless produced “a real chilling effect,” as one policy analyst recalls. Some researchers withdrew from plans to brief lawmakers on far-right extremism.

In July 2017, Selim tendered his resignation. Not long afterward, a senior official on the interagency task force running C.V.E. efforts withdrew. More departures followed. The Department of Homeland Security renamed the Office of Community Partnerships the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships. At the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, analysts specifically looking at domestic terrorism and coordinating with local law enforcement were reassigned as public-affairs liaisons, Snyder says. “So no one is looking at the intelligence and connecting the dots, which is what the Department of Homeland Security was created to do.”

In the lingo of the counterterrorism world, the department’s responsibility is anything “left of boom,” meaning all the pre-emptive steps that might prevent an attack, from securing the borders to synthesizing and sharing intelligence to working with community leaders and local law enforcement to help them better identify risks. Today, at least for the federal government, Snyder says “left of boom is dead.”

William Fears was born in 1987 and spent his childhood in Jasper, Tex., a tiny and deeply segregated town about 130 miles northeast of Houston. East Texas is Klan country, and Jasper holds a notable spot in the racist history of the region as the town where, in 1998, when Fears was 10, three white men lynched a black man named James Byrd Jr., chaining him to the back of a truck and dragging him to death.

Early in his life, Fears, searching for identity, cycled through a long list of ideologies. He was 14 on Sept. 11, 2001, old enough to absorb the patriotic fervor of that moment but too young to enlist. For a year or two, he was a Michael Moore-style populist, having been “red-pilled on ‘Bowling for Columbine.’ ” Then, having spent a great deal of his spare time stoned and watching YouTube, Fears embraced the Sept. 11 “truthers” movement. As he spent more and more time on sites like Infowars, he was exposed to notions that the government, backed by the Illumi-nati, the globalists, the Freemasons — Jews, but not “the Jews” as he would later come to see them — had blown up the towers, crashed the financial markets and plunged the country into economic crisis. This led to his next great obsession: the candidacy of the G.O.P. presidential hopeful Ron Paul, a libertarian who had amassed a large grass-roots following of what The New York Times then called “iconoclastic white men.”

But Fears eventually grew bored with Paul, just as he had grown bored with Michael Moore, and it was in this state of vague political disillusionment, and heavy drug use, that Fears kidnapped a former girlfriend in 2009 and stabbed her in the face, legs and neck before she managed to escape. In 2010, he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Fears doesn’t like to talk much about his sojourn in the Texas state-prison system, though like many young men who went from the penitentiary to the far right, he was introduced to the basic tenets of white supremacy there. “White guys got to stick together,” he says, referring to an admitted friendship with members of the Texas branch of the Aryan Brotherhood, one of the most notoriously brutal white-supremacist gangs in the country. But he dropped those friendships after prison, he insists. “I didn’t like the whole Nazi skinhead thing with tattoos on their face and beating up minorities for no reason,” he says, implying that they represented an earlier generation: “They’re like 1.0s.”

Six years later, Fears was paroled and emerged from prison drug-free but otherwise largely the same. He was still a conspiracy theorist, though he was less obsessed with the government, his friend John Canales noticed when they reconnected that summer. “Now it was all about the Jews,” Canales says. At home in the Houston suburb of Pasadena, Fears submerged himself in what to him was the new, hyperconnected world of the internet, where every YouTube video he watched algorithmically directed him to others with increasingly far-right political agendas. He was fascinated by men like Richard Spencer, who fashioned himself as the second coming of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. He was also intrigued by Donald Trump, the troubadour of a new generation of angry white men, the alt-right movement — white supremacy 2.0 — with its in-jokes and symbols that were mostly lost on U.S. law enforcement.

‘The administration had this do-nothing approach. They kept telling us, well, we see that white supremacy is a problem, but there’s no way we can get ourselves involved.’

Fears believed in the power of memes, though alt-right memes, while dripping in irony, were also, in essence, hate speech, part of a propaganda war arguably intended to spread terror just as much as any ISIS execution video. Fears, his friend Canales says, was one of the first people Canales knew to understand this and promote the memes as broadly as he could, standing on street corners and “sieg heil-ing” at passers-by or waving a swastika-laden Pepe the Frog sign reading “Free Helicopter Rides,” an allusion to the murder of political enemies, notably leftists.

In December 2016, less than six months after getting out of prison, Fears went to his first Richard Spencer event, on the campus of Texas A&M. More so-called free-speech events followed, where young white men in red MAGA hats and polo shirts descended upon college campuses or progressive enclaves in otherwise blood-red states: a clean-cut Trumpian army, marching in formation or hurling insults at activists who, outraged by their very presence, would try to fight them.

Sometimes the police would intervene, or not. Fears, for one, always felt safe with the police in Texas, though he said “they work for ZOG” — the so-called Zionist Occupied Government. “They’ll take their paycheck over the country.”

Cops would stand watch at events, sometimes on horseback, and while they might not have been ideologically aligned with the alt-right, they still tolerated them. Fears said the cops were far less forgiving of Antifa, a catchall term that has been used to describe dedicated anti-fascists and so-called anarchist extremists, as well as animal rights activists, immigration rights activists, members of the local Socialist movement, environmental protesters like those who had recently been blasted by water cannons and rubber bullets at Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter supporters, whose protests have been met by dozens of cops in riot gear, as well as sometimes members of a paramilitary support unit. One Houston activist, who went to high school with Fears, recalls a rally where the police posed for pictures with members of the alt-right. “Very buddy-buddy,” he says.

The same essential scenario played out across the country. At a rally in Sacramento in June 2016 organized by the white-supremacist Traditionalist Worker Party, a throng of counterprotesters showed up. “The police didn’t step in really at all,” a police observer and representative of the National Lawyers Guild later told The Sacramento Bee. “They basically just let people do what they wanted to do,” the observer said. “In this case, someone made a decision just to let them fight it out.” Ten people were hospitalized, at least five for stabbing wounds and other lacerations, most of them left-wing counterprotesters, some of whom were later charged with assault. Only one white supremacist was arrested, though court records originally acquired by The Guardian mentioned at least four T.W.P.-affiliated men who came armed with knives to the rally but were not charged. “We’re looking at you as a victim,” an investigator with the California Highway Patrol reportedly assured a member of the T.W.P. after the rally.

One domestic-terrorism expert who conducts hate-crimes training for law enforcement was baffled by the pushback she received from police officers who didn’t seem to view white-supremacist groups as a law-enforcement problem. “They’d say things like, ‘Why aren’t you calling Black Lives Matter or Antifa a hate group?’ The answer is, because they’re not hate groups! But they didn’t see it that way.”

It was in this atmosphere that Fears made his progress through various protests. He traveled to Charlottesville with a backpack of dystopian gear: goggles, gloves and a helmet, though he disguised himself as a Trump supporter in a suit. It was war. It was also fun. By the summer of 2017, the media had begun to cover more far-right events, leading more people to show up in protest, which furthered the right’s victimization narrative, which in turn led to more events and more violence, all of which was packaged into neat selling points for a movement whose actual real-life followers may have been far fewer than they appeared.

A person’s willingness to brawl was a point of pride. Some of the most ardent fighters, many of them felons, became celebrities in their own right, offered speaking slots at rallies, where their V.I.P. status earned them police protection. The Rise Above Movement, led in part by a gang member who had gone to prison for an attack, turned beat-downs into an art form, which they promoted on YouTube, drawing recruits. Nathan Damigo, a former Marine who was incarcerated for five years for armed robbery, used footage of his punching a young woman in the face during a Berkeley protest as a recruiting video for his white-nationalist organization, Identity Evropa. The Proud Boys went as far as to create an entire culture around gang-style rituals, including initiation beatings.

On Facebook, various white men were stating their intention of going to Charlottesville for what they understood would be a huge gathering of the tribes, making plans of whom to meet up with and what to bring. Fears initially advised against carrying weapons, but he suggested keeping them close by. “It all comes down to police,” he said on Facebook. “If they leave us to fight for ourselves like in Berkeley, we know to get ready for bricks to start flying.”

In private communications on the chat service Discord, posted online by the progressive watchdog Unicorn Riot, organizers of Unite the Right spent weeks discussing tactics. The F.B.I. itself was limited in its surveillance capacity (though many left-wing groups argued that this did not prevent the bureau from monitoring their activities), and in the absence of comprehensive federal scrutiny, right-wing activists trawled through left-wing websites, shared photos of leading anti-fascist and racial-justice activists and infiltrated real-life gatherings. In advance of the event, leaked chats documented potential attendees openly advising their comrades to take note of any threats of violence so they could share them with the police. Erroll Southers later remarked on the sophistication of advising their followers not to bring cellphones, and sharing information among small cells of affinity groups: “From an intelligence perspective, it was very impressive.”

From a law-enforcement perspective, it was chaos. Rarely did a white-supremacist event draw more than 60 people before 2016; 100 was remarkable. But Charlottesville was another galaxy, both in the sheer number of marchers and their diversity. Southers notes, “You had factions of white nationalists, white supremacists, Klan members, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates — which was like having ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Shabab and Boko Haram at the same rally. And they were all rallying together, shoulder to shoulder, while the police watched these people go toe to toe sort of like a modern-day ‘Game of Thrones’ battle.”

“I put my baton on the ground and hands in the air,” the protester later said of the moment when Tyler TenBrink pointed his gun directly at him. The man was terrified. TenBrink took aim and fired. One of the other protesters hid in the trees. Several more crouched behind a small wall, screaming. The bullet missed. The men jumped back into Fears’s Jeep and, with Colton behind the wheel, sped away toward Interstate 75 — but not before a witness wrote down the license-plate number.

Lieutenant Stout learned of the shooting later that night, and while no one was hurt, his heart sank. In all his preparations, Stout hadn’t considered that violence might occur outside the secure perimeter they had so carefully set up. That night, the Florida state police caught up with the Jeep on the highway and arrested the Texans. The city officials breathed a sigh of relief and lauded the day as a success.

Will Fears spent more than 40 days in the Alachua County Jail on $1 million bail. Depending on whom he is talking with, he and his brother and TenBrink, who both remain in the Alachua County Jail, were the “celebrities” of the jail, or maybe just Fears was. He portrayed his stay as fairly cushy, and one in which he was a very big deal, which of course he wasn’t to the authorities who picked him up in December, after Texas ordered him extradited back to Houston to face charges in the supposed assault of his girlfriend last October. Along the way back to Texas, Fears tried to make conversation. “I was on the news, you didn’t see that?” he remarked. When Fears arrived back in Houston, he spent two nights in the Harris County Jail, then appeared before a judge, who promptly released him on $5,000 bail.

Fears returned home to Pasadena and resumed the same life he had always led. Apparently unconcerned about exposure, he had posted his cellphone number on social media. Earlier this year, I called him. We met at a Belgian cafe in a rapidly gentrifying part of Houston. When I arrived, Fears was sitting at an outside table, drinking an Arnold Palmer.

Fears told me he had spent most of the past year celebrating the alt-right’s covert domination of the news cycle. He seemed thrilled that Donald Trump tweeted about a so-called migrant caravan, which, like the supposed “white genocide” in South Africa, was mostly fiction. Yet it was effectively promoted by alt-right websites like The Daily Stormer and Breitbart, and now right-wing celebrities like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson were talking about it. “This idea that the alt-right is falling apart and is going to go away, it’s not true,” he says. “The alt-right formulates all these ideas,” he went on. “What Tucker Carlson talks about, we talked about a year ago.”

It was a few days after the massacre of 17 people in Parkland, Fla., and Fears had been considering the spate of school shootings in America. He repeated the rumor, widespread on 4chan and Gab, that the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was Jewish, and so were many of his victims. It’s unclear if this is true. But if it were, it would make no sense to Fears, who, if he believes in anything, believes in the essentially tribal nature of all human beings. Jews, he said, “have a biological need to look out for their own.” He had spoken a bit about what he called the J.Q., or Jewish Question, as successive generations of anti-Semites have referred to the debate over how Western nations should handle the presence of Jews in their societies. “I don’t hate them for it, but I realize that their interests aren’t the same as mine.”

Fears’s views aren’t unique — roughly 22 million Americans call it “acceptable” to hold neo-Nazi or white-supremacist views, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in the wake of Charlottesville in August 2017. Roughly the same number of people, about 10 percent of Americans, said they supported the “alt-right”; about half of those polled said they were against it. Driving around Fears’s neighborhood one day, I saw Confederate flags, and American flags, and sometimes a Blue Lives Matter flag, and the black-and-white “Don’t Tread on Me” flag waving from shiny new trucks. I also saw row after row of McMansions, many of them with swimming pools. There were new S.U.V.s parked in the driveways, and boats: signs of money made and money spent. One former high school classmate of Fears’s described the culture as “wannabe redneck.”

Fears says that unlike him, the bulk of the alt-right prefers to stay in the shadows. “I see a lot of people and talk to a lot of people that people would pay a lot of money to find out who they are,” he says. Some of them, he suggests, take part in his weekly Thursday-morning “fight club,” practicing mixed martial arts. Some have white-collar jobs or are veterans, groups that make up a large part of the movement.

Fears was wearing a baseball cap adorned with a red, white and blue patch known as the “whomster” flag. It’s “kind of a racist joke,” he said, albeit one that most people won’t get, as they probably have no clue what “whomster” means (it’s a common meme that refers to the supposed, if baseless, fact that African-Americans say “whomst” a lot). The flag featured the Texas lone star against a backdrop of 14 red and white stripes, an allusion to a signature white supremacist slogan addressing their goal of preserving the white race. The star is centered on a large blue sonnerad, or black sun, an ancient symbol favored by white supremacists, who see it as less obvious than, say, a swastika. In recent years, even longtime neo-Nazi groups like the National Socialist Movement have rebranded by dropping the swastika for less “triggering” symbols like sonnerads or runes. The meaning is the same.

‘I think it’s easy for our generation, or the youth, the way society is now, to feel victimized. It’s like with your back against the wall, you know what I mean?’

Fears has said that he was upset that his little brother, who in September pleaded guilty to accessory to attempted murder, got in so much trouble. “He’s not really a white nationalist that much,” he said during an interview with a right-wing podcast. “He’s really only involved in anything as a result of being my little brother.”

It was a bit like the little brother-big brother Boston bombing duo, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whom Fears identifies with. He agreed to meet with me, he said, because I had written about them. “I think it’s easy for our generation, or the youth, the way society is now, to feel victimized. It’s like with your back against the wall, you know what I mean?”

In the Tsarnaevs’ case, this led to terrorism, and for Dzhokhar, the surviving brother, it led to a stretch on death row. Fears, drinking his iced tea-lemonade concoction, considered this. “Maybe he saw a lot of things in the world that bothered him and just didn’t know how to deal with it,” he said. “I can sort of relate to that.”

Fears munched on some bread. “You’re Jewish, right?” he said pleasantly.

In fact, I am. And while I happened to be sitting across the table from an admitted fascist who admires Adolf Hitler and has advocated (he says trollishly) “white Shariah,” I didn’t feel threatened by Will Fears. Like so many of the movement’s vague anymen, he presented himself as polite, articulate and interested in cultural politics, and though his views are abhorrent, he stated them all so laconically you might forget that he actually believes in the concept of a white ethnostate. And that’s the point: The genius of the new far right, if we could call it “genius,” has been their steadfast determination to blend into the larger fabric of society to such an extent that perhaps the only way you might see them as a problem is if you actually want to see them at all.

The purpose of the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is to investigate terrorism and share information from those investigations so that the law-enforcement community is able to identify the most dangerous individuals. State and local law-enforcement “fusion centers” were set up with this same goal in mind. There are perhaps half a dozen information-sharing and threat-assessment networks available to law enforcement. In an alternate universe, these networks would function efficiently. In reality, German says, “far-right violence remains a blind spot. It just isn’t properly tracked or understood.”

On Aug. 31 this year, his 25th anniversary on the force, Dan Stout retired from the Gainesville Police Department, in part because of the stress and fatigue he endured from the Spencer incident. “The level of resources and financial impact these types of events are now costing communities to prepare for and manage, it’s just unsustainable,” he says. “How much of our city do we literally turn into a quasi-police state to manage this?” Stout’s study of the alt-right and left-wing movements made him an “expert,” at least in the eyes of federal and state law enforcement, who, he says, began to invite him to visit their jurisdictions to share what he had learned. “They were soaking it up like a sponge,” he says. And yet, in reality he feels that they had collectively dodged a bullet — “no pun intended,” he says. “Just another inch to the right or the left and we’d have had a very bad situation.”

In May, I called up the Harris County district attorney’s office to ask why someone who had been in jail in Florida on $1 million bond had, upon extradition, been released on $5,000 bond. Joshua Phanco, a prosecutor who at the time was in charge of Fears’s case, was alarmed by the call. He vaguely recalled that Fears had been in prison in Florida, but he wasn’t aware that Fears had been charged with attempted murder, or that he had anything to do with white supremacy. “This is the first I’m hearing this,” he told me. (Fears’s charge in Florida has since been dropped.)

Phanco, who has since moved on to the district attorney’s major-crimes division, spoke with me for two hours. He diagramed the byzantine system that is the Harris County criminal-justice system, one of the nation’s largest, and a study in dysfunction. There is no central database, no way to share information among all the tiny police departments that feed into the clerk’s office, which then divvies up crimes among 22 criminal courts, now scattered across the entire county. Basically, he said, unless someone tells him about a guy he’s prosecuting, he has no clue.

“I mean, how come I didn’t know what happened in Florida?” he said. “Is it my fault? Is it Florida’s fault? How come there wasn’t an officer in Houston watching this? How come he was on nobody’s radar?” Houston has an aggressive gang task force whose investigators have deep knowledge of everyone from the street-level drug dealers to the cartel bosses. “If a fairly high-up guy from MS-13 sneezes, I get a call at 10 p.m.,” he said.

If Fears were on someone’s radar, Phanco doubted he would ever get off it. “But who’s responsible for keeping track of these alt-right guys in Houston? Nobody. For me the question is, well, how come? If you want to look at these guys as terrorists — which I think it is when they’re firing guns out of cars at protesters,” he noted, “then the question remains: Who or what will prevent him from committing more crimes? And, from my chair, nobody,” Phanco said. “Nobody’s watching it, nobody’s tracking it. And that’s what’s got me scared.”

Janet Reitman is a contributing writer for the magazine who is working on a book about the rise of the far right in post-9/11 America. She is also a contributing editor for Rolling Stone.

Guns send over 8,000 US kids to ER each year, analysis says

By LINDSEY TANNER — 29 October 2018

FILE – In this Jan. 26, 2013, file photo, handguns are displayed on a vendor’s table at an annual gun show in Albany, N.Y. In a study looking at data from 2006-14, serious gun injuries including many from assaults sent 75,000 U.S. children and teens to emergency rooms over the nine years. Results were released on Monday, Oct. 29, 2018. (AP Photo/Philip Kamrass, File)

Gun injuries, including many from assaults, sent 75,000 U.S. children and teens to emergency rooms over nine years at a cost of almost $3 billion, a first-of-its-kind study found.

Researchers called it the first nationally representative study on ER visits for gun injuries among U.S. kids. They found that more than one-third of the wounded children were hospitalized and 6 percent died. Injuries declined during most of the 2006-14 study, but there was an upswing in the final year.

The researchers found that 11 of every 100,000 children and teens treated in U.S. emergency rooms have gun-related injuries. That amounts to about 8,300 kids each year.

The scope of the problem is broader though; the study doesn’t include kids killed or injured by gunshots who never made it to the hospital, nor does it count costs for gunshot patients after they’re sent home.

“I don’t know what more we need to see in the world to be able to come together and tackle this problem,” said Dr. Faiz Gani, the lead author and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University medical school.

The study is an analysis of estimates on emergency department visits in a national database created by the U.S. government’s Agency on Healthcare Research and Quality.

The researchers focused on victims under age 18; the average age was about 15.

Almost half the gun injuries were from assaults, nearly 40 percent were unintentional and 2 percent were suicides. There were five times more ER visits for boys than for girls.

Pediatric ER visits for gun injuries fell from a rate of 15 per 100,000 in 2006 to about 7 per 100,000 in 2013, then jumped to 10 per 100,000 in 2014, the most recent data.

University funding paid for the analysis, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.

The findings highlight that gun violence involving kids extends beyond mass shootings that gain the most attention, said Dr. Robert Sege, co-author of an American Academy of Pediatrics gun injuries policy.

“It’s extraordinarily sad because these children grow up in fear and it affects their ability to feel safe and comfortable at home or in school. It has an enormous ripple effect on child development,” said Sege, a Tufts University professor of medicine who was not involved in the research.

Pressure from the gun lobby has limited U.S. government funding for research on gun injuries and death, and that has led to big gaps in understanding the scope of the problem, said Dr. Denise Dowd, an ER physician at Children’s Mercy hospital in Kansas City.

“It’s really important that we have an idea of the magnitude of life lost and injured and how much money we are spending … so we can prioritize it as a national health concern.”

But she said much more needs to be known for prevention.

“We need national surveillance systems just like we do with motor vehicle deaths, to track these injuries and figure out the circumstances,” she said.

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Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner .

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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.